The Hollow Shaft: Echoes from Below
The mine hummed with a quiet threat as the team descended, ropes creaking like the sighs of old giants waking from sleep. Lanterns threw yellow halos on damp rock, painting the walls with gold that felt heavy in the chest. They had come chasing a rumor of a shaft that should not exist, a rumor born of maps torn at the margins and the kind of fear you can taste on the tongue—metallic and sour, like coins spent in the dark.
Down the vertical throat they went, deeper than the last survey could guide them. The air grew colder, the light thinner, until the world narrowed to a tunnel so still that every breath sounded loud enough to trigger a memory. In the heart of the hollow shaft, the walls bore a pattern of mineral veins that formed a circular dent, as if the rock itself had been listening and decided to hold its breath. A faint, unfamiliar ache pressed behind their teeth, a longing to turn back that felt almost like listening to a story you already know the ending of.
“We should have turned back at the first creak,” Mara whispered, but the words dissolved into the damp air, returning as a chorus of echoes that wasn’t hers.
A series of discoveries followed, each more unsettling than the last. Tools lay arranged in a pattern that pointed toward a seam sealed by centuries of sediment. Footprints appeared in the dust and vanished into nothing, as if the mine offered a mirage of motion rather than a path. A cold breath clung to their necks even when the lamps burned bright, and the creak of timber echoed from a depth that looked more like memory than grain and oak.
- Whispers curling along the basalt like smoke from a forgotten campfire.
- Drips that sounded like names, spelled out syllables in a language only the rocks remembered.
- Rungs of a ladder that led nowhere, each rung numbered in a hand that did not belong to any living miner.
- A cart paused at a sealed door, with the initials carved into the wood—an inscription older than the mine and younger than the map they carried.
In the deepest chamber, Mara found a mirror of the mine’s history—not glass, but a still pool of mineral sheen reflecting not herself, but the faces of those who had never left the surface. The echoes shifted with her breath, answering with voices that claimed to have waited for rescue that would never come. The room smelled of rain and rust and something more ancient: the moment when a thing remembers being found and chooses to forget again.
When dawn bled into the narrow shaft, Mara stood at the lip of the cavern and listened. The echoes now spoke in room tones—faint, patient, insistent—telling her that some passages aren’t meant to be walked, only listened to. She crawled back toward the rope, leaving behind the hollow shaft and the chorus of voices that would not forget her name. The surface world appeared as a pale promise, but beneath it, the mine kept its own hours, and the hollow shaft kept a resident echo—waiting for the next curious step to awaken what lies below.